


when i whare i wish to be

by bastaerd



Series: all well [1]
Category: The Terror (TV 2018), The Terror - Dan Simmons
Genre: (in a really milquetoast way), Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, M/M, harry peglar has adhd, john bridgens has a bookshop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-24
Updated: 2020-06-24
Packaged: 2021-03-03 22:14:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,376
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24892978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bastaerd/pseuds/bastaerd
Summary: “I can’t abide by those stories,” John says without irritation, just a sadness in his voice that hints at something lost. “Stories that inflict suffering upon their characters and toss them out. If I were to put them through all the trouble, I would let them have something to remember it by, at the very least. Once they’re out of it.”“You could write,” Harry ventures. “A story of your own. I’d read it.”“You would, would you?”
Relationships: John Bridgens/Harry Peglar
Series: all well [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1839514
Comments: 11
Kudos: 35





	when i whare i wish to be

This is how they sleep:

John turned on his side, knees slightly bent, and Harry on his back, his legs out straight. They are tucked between John’s, in the interest of space and of keeping as close to each other as they can manage. Their right hands are clasped together, resting on Harry’s chest. Somehow, their joined hands always find their way to the spot above his heart by the morning.

Neither of them wonder about it, nor can they fall asleep any other way.

* * *

Harry is helping John stock the shelves one day after closing. They make it less of a chore than it ever felt, though, with John, it’s never been a chore. Perhaps if John employed anyone else, they might feel differently, but as it is, just the two of them in the otherwise empty shop, music playing from the record player behind the counter, Harry can find nothing but enjoyment for the task. Every so often, he pulls a book from the cardboard box he’s in the middle of and holds it at such an angle so that John can see it while Harry is still stood on the old-fashioned sliding ladder.

“Have you read this one?” he asks, and, with only a handful of exceptions, the answer is “Yes.”

They go on like that for hours, which isn’t to say that there are boxes upon boxes to unpack, but rather that they turn it into leisure, drawing it out unnecessarily for their own pleasure. When the kettle whistles, John goes to the back to pour the water for their tea while Harry stays out in the shop proper, dropping down from the later to get another armful of books and then hopping back on. John says it strikes a kind of fear into him, the way Harry handles the height, but he always says it with affection, and so Harry knows the fear can’t be so unbearable. He shelves what he has in his hands, and when John returns, has only one left before he is to do his ladder-jumping routine again. Conscientiously, he waits until John has set both mugs down on a nearby table.

“What about this one?” Harry asks, turning the book over to the back cover and not reading whatever congratulations reviewers have given it. Whatever happened to putting a summary there instead and letting him form his own opinion?

John gives the book a glance, then pulls a face like he has just stubbed his toe and turns away from it. From a man who has something good to say about most anything Harry has shown him so far, it’s as violent a reaction as there can be. He may as well have thrown it to the floor, ground it under his heel, and spat on it.

“I can’t abide by those stories,” John says without irritation, just a sadness in his voice that hints at something lost. “Stories that inflict suffering upon their characters and toss them out. If I were to put them through all the trouble, I would let them have something to remember it by, at the very least. Once they’re out of it.”

“You could write,” Harry ventures. “A story of your own. I’d read it.”

John faces him, eyes soft.

“You would, would you?” he asks, to which Harry can’t help but smile.

“I’d do my best to,” he assures him. “Read a good 50 pages a day, put it down often so it never grates on me.”

John, who has just pulled another stack of books from a box, holding them in a horizontal pile and pressing them to keep them from dropping to the floor, raises his eyebrows, briefly glancing up at Harry.

“A novel, is it?” he asks, amused. Harry steps down from the ladder this time, so that a flinch doesn’t change that expression.

“Or whatever you feel like writing,” he says. “I’d read anything by you, fiction, nonfiction, poetry…”

“Poetry!” John laughs. When Harry kisses the corner of his smile, he leans in indulgently. “You’ve got such opinions of me.”

“Well, you’re better with poems,” Harry points out, deciding to take a break from the shelving for the time being and making for the table. He takes the mug with a salacious pun about Charles Dickens, an author neither of them can bring themselves to respect, and leaves the more tasteful “Austen-tatious” one for John. “I can hardly remember any, but you can recite ‘em like you’re reading for an audience.”

“That’s not true,” says John, but he knows it’s more because of modesty than because Harry is a great teller of tales.

“Ah, right,” Harry laughs into his mug, and then, to prove his own point, adds: “The sea, the sea, the open sea, it grew so fresh the ever-free.”

“You’re not even trying to recall it.”

“Sure I am, now quit interrupting. The ever free, the ever free, without… ah, without it… without it something about the Earth and guarding it above the regions ‘round. I love the sea, I love the sea.”

He finishes with a flourish of the hand not holding the mug, and John gives him a very dry round of applause.

“I remember it better in your voice,” Harry admits. “Comes to me easier when I imagine you saying the words. When it’s me, it sounds…”

How it sounds is nothing worth writing home about. It sounds like an impostor, something ill-equipped for the job. It sounds strange and unfamiliar in the way a new piece of clothing two sizes off feels. It’s words that don’t belong in his throat.

 _“I’ve liv’d since then, in calm and strife,”_ comes John’s voice, soft and unpolished. Hearing it throws the rest of the world into silence while he speaks. _“Full fifty summers, a sailor’s life,_

_With wealth to spend and a power to range,_

_But never have sought nor sighed for change;_

_And Death, whenever he comes to me,_

_Shall come on the wild, unbounded sea!”_

The quiet that blankets the shop lingers, like the final ringing of an echo, an absence of noise that suspends time. For a moment, Harry is swaying, as if moved by a gentle rocking motion, but remains balanced, compensating with a slight shift of his weight from one leg to the other and vice versa. John has resumed shelving what is, by Harry’s best guess, a mystery series.

“See?” Harry breathes. “I don’t need to memorize a thing when I can listen to you.”

He sees John’s hand pause, and catches the edge of a smile on his turned face.

“Alright, Harry,” he replies in kind. “There will be poems.”

* * *

Sometimes Harry returns from work and finds John already asleep, stretched out in the bed so that his feet hang off the end. Sometimes there is a book with him, tucked against his stomach, one hand over the cover as if he’s protecting it from some imagined harm. Invariably, the sight provokes something in Harry: upset and slight nausea, but he’s never pressed the feeling for answers.

After the first time, John told him to wake him when he finds him like that.

“It wouldn’t bother me,” he had said to him. “It would give me the chance to fall asleep beside you, anyway.”

Neither of them have confessed that their dreams are pleasanter when they have that chance, but it’s understood between them anyway. Harry, who drives deliveries and necessarily keeps strange and varying hours, tends more towards restlessness for that reason. That’s separately from the way he has tended towards restlessness in most areas for as long as his memory extends.

He had kissed John on the cheek and nudged him until John politely shoved over so that he could crawl into bed. They found their usual position and fell asleep in minutes.

* * *

Harry returns home bruised to hell and back. He comes back in the early afternoon, a cup of coffee in one hand and the strap of his bag slung across his chest in such a way so that it puts the least amount of pressure on the areas that hurt. At the coffee shop, he had been as discreet as possible, even with something of an embarrassing limp, but John can tell as soon as he sees him.

“Harry,” he calls to him, bypassing greeting entirely and hurrying over, his hands hovering just over Harry, not knowing where it was safe to land. “What happened?”

“Fell,” Harry replies, a scowl on his face. His coffee tips precariously as he sets it down on the kitchen table, but since he’s already drunk at least half of it before it had even gotten a chance to cool, the surface remains safe. “Someone left shit on the floor of the truck, and I tripped and fell.”

It was spectacular, if painful; he had fallen at the perfect angle to catch a shelf on the way down, knocking himself to the floor and an avalanche of boxes onto him as he went. If the forgotten parcel had been an accident, he suspects Manson to be the culprit. If intentional, then likely Des Voeux, who seems to take an occasional vindictive pleasure in the fact that their boss can’t tell the two of them apart half the time, the shit that he is.

“Here, let me help,” John says as Harry struggles with his bag, trying to get it off of himself while only moving his shoulders as little as possible, which works about as well as he had expected but hadn’t stopped him from hoping. John lifts the strap of it up and over, and Harry ducks his head as much as his sore neck allows without undue pain. He winces, and John winces, too, in sympathy.

“Quite a fall you took.” He sets Harry’s bag down beside the table, not taking his eyes off of him, as though Harry might collapse. “Have a seat, I’ll get you something for the pain.”

As Harry lowers himself gingerly into the chair closest to him, John lingers by his side, and only leaves when he’s seated. Even then, he doesn’t need to go far, as the refrigerator is only a few paces away in their small kitchen. John grabs a plastic sandwich bag from on top of it, then stoops to open the freezer and fish out enough ice to fill it. He then wraps it in a clean dish towel and comes back to Harry, pulling another chair up next to him so that they can be at eye-level with each other. One hand extends towards Harry in an imploring sort of way, and Harry doesn’t need to hear the question before he acquiesces.

Bad enough to roll up his sleeve. Up and down his forearm, yellow-green sore spots bloom and ache. The worst of it is higher up on his arms, and then on his back and the hip he had landed on, but it doesn’t diminish the hurt. John’s face still blanches at the sight.

“It’s worse here,” Harry says before John can take charge with the fretting, and shifts uncomfortably in his chair so that he can indicate his left side. John leans over so that he can put the ice pack against Harry’s side, watching him carefully for the first sign of pain. It’s uncomfortable, but Harry pushes that aside and covers John’s hand with his own, seeing John’s eyes flit to that arm again.

“They’ll look worse tomorrow,” John tells him, “but they should turn around in a little while. We’ll take care of them.”

He says it, Harry knows, more for his own benefit than for the assumption that Harry’s never had a bruise in his life.

“Good care of them,” Harry agrees, and smiles, for John’s benefit. “You know, I could go for a hot bath.”

It coaxes John’s face into something more relaxed, at least, as he entertains the idea.

“A hot bath would help, certainly.”

* * *

In an anthology of poetry that had to be at least as old as John, Harry finds a pencilled drawing. How the pencil survived so long, or if the drawing is younger than the book in which he found it, he only wonders for a minute before he puts the book back on the shelf in John’s personal library, consisting of two tall bookcases, the both of them packed two books deep on all shelves. A week later, he finds himself gravitating to that same book. Poetry is an easy thing for him. Not because he fancies himself a great literary analyst or anything like that, but because he can read a poem all the way through with little struggle. If it rhymes, he can use the scheme to orient himself when it comes to archaic or otherwise unfamiliar words.

When he finishes thumbing through his few favorites from this volume, he stops again on the inside of the back cover. Framed by the heel of his hand is the little pencil drawing, possibly of a fish or of an eye, ringed with what might either be lashes or tiny letters. On a whim, he takes a picture of the little drawing with his phone, plays with the settings to increase the contrast and further darken the pencil.

Two weeks later, he sits reclined in a tattoo parlor, his left forearm outstretched. The tattoo artist, a man with bushy, shoulder-length hair and perpetual mischief in the set of his eyes places the thin paper on Harry’s bared wrist and transfers the design.

“This’s a unique design you’ve brought me,” the artist remarks. “Like to make sure I’m not completing your induction into a cult.”

Harry laughs at that. For all he knows, the drawing could mean anything, but it’s not recognizable to him as anything but a drawing found at the back of a book. More than that, it was in John’s shelves.

“Reminds me of someone I love,” he replies honestly. The artist nods.

“Then I believe you,” he says. “Your first tattoo?”

Harry nods.

“Well, first one’s always a winner, lad.”

* * *

Harry wakes to find John hunched over to one side, the lamp on his side of the bed turned on and casting low, orange light across the sheets. It’s too early to be awake, even though Harry is used to waking obscenely early for work, but that doesn’t preclude him from complaining, especially on his days off. This is one such day.

“John?” he mumbles, mouth not wanting to move more than is necessary to speak. At the sound of his name and Harry’s voice, John turns around, looking apologetic. In his hands, he holds a small notepad and a fountain pen, an old, goldish color where John’s thumb and middle finger have worn away the enamel. In the dim light, Harry can see the shadow of John’s reading glasses more than the glasses themselves, where they are propped on the crooked bridge of his nose.

“I’m sorry,” he says, hushed. “Did I wake you?”

Harry shakes his head.

“Can always fall back asleep,” he assures him. “What’s…?”

He inclines his head towards the notepad; John’s eyes crinkle at the corners in the surest form of a smile.

“Oh, this,” he says with a laugh. “I’m trying my hand at your suggestion, finally. Poetry.”

That gets Harry if not sitting up, inching closer to John until he can drape an arm over his waist and press his head against his shoulder like a cat demanding attention. He blinks, yawns, fights the urge to close his eyes and drift away again.

“Bet it’s lovely. Read some to me?”

Under his arm, John’s belly jolts with a laugh. He hears the hard clatter of the fountain pen being set aside, and feels John’s hand on his back, warm and wide between his shoulder blades.

“In time, Harry,” he replies indulgently. “I’m afraid this is a secret you must permit me to keep, for the time being.”

“‘N what’s the time being?” Harry demands, hoping to sway him by pressing a kiss to the spot of arm that’s directly under his mouth. “Until tomorrow? The day after, the rest of the week...?”

“The process of getting something published can take months,” John answers. “Years, even. Just look at James.”

“Right, but I’ve heard his fucking poems,” Harry points out. John laughs again at that.

“Puts William McGonagall to shame,” he agrees, not for the first time endearing himself infinitely to Harry. “Bless the man. He’s done well for himself in nonfiction, and you would never know from reading his Franklin biography.”

That must be true, if John is saying so, though he can summon a good word for nearly any book put in front of him, and those he can’t, he lays into with a thick disappointment, as if the author has gone astray. He doesn’t hate poorly-written books, or poorly-conceived narratives; it’s more like he mourns them. At any rate, Fitzjames’ recent stuff hasn’t caught any grief from him, so it must be decent. Harry trusts John’s opinion more than the rave reviews Fitzjames tends to get in the first few weeks after a new publication.

“Well, what’ve you got so far?” Harry asks. “I’m not asking you to read it to me, I’m just wondering how much you’ve written. That’s all.”

John kisses Harry’s head, flipping the notepad closed. Like this, he can now see that the page on which John had been writing was one of the last few, and the notepad is considerably thick. John fans through the pages, producing a sound like someone shuffling a deck of cards. It ruffles Harry’s bangs softly, and he closes his eyes.

“Hmm,” he hums, “now I don’t think I can get back to sleep,” even though his eyelids say otherwise. He stifles a yawn against the back of his hand before returning it to its previous position. John recognizes this as the ploy it is, and yields, despite it.

“Let’s have something we can have a laugh with, then,” he suggests.

“Hitchhiker’s Guide?”

“Just the thing,” John replies, plucking the book from the nightstand and opening it to one of the many dog-eared pages.

* * *

In the end, his arm heals, as does the rest of him. True to John’s words, the bruises go from chartreuse to the color of old grapes, and hurt badly enough to keep him home from work for a day, but, also true to John’s words, they fade. As they do, John’s face looks less and less pinched whenever he sees them. Harry knows that if he asks, he won’t receive a satisfactory answer, because there will be none to give. He also knows it comes from the same place as whatever it is he feels when he spots John asleep on his back with a book in his hands.

He knows, on some base level, that it’s a place many of his and John’s friends and acquaintances have; a place which prevents Henry from learning to swim, causes Sol to clasp his friends’ hands in lieu of bidding them goodbye, springs tears in Tom’s otherwise dry eyes when told he’s done well. He knows it’s better to feel and know the feeling is shared than to ask why and how.

What matters is this: he sleeps beside John every night, and wakes there, too. He comes home to warmth and love, to solid arms that wrap around him and clasp him there, beating heart against beating heart. There is music, picked out of John’s enormous box of records or purchased on a whim from the corner of some secondhand store, and to which they dance badly and laugh at themselves. There is comfort, chasing away the nightmares in all their abstract and distinct forms, Harry rubbing circles onto John’s back until the feeling of shale dissipates, John stirring honey into Harry’s tea in the wee hours of the morning to soothe the illusion of blood in his mouth. There is freedom, in the way they smile around each other’s names, in the words, _“For my husband, whose idea this was in the first place, and to whom I dedicate every stanza.”_ when John’s book is finally published.

At long, long last, there are poems.

**Author's Note:**

> \- title is from the peglar papers  
> \- john quotes the poem [The Sea](https://www.bartleby.com/246/57.html) by barry cornwall; a bastardized version of it appears in the peglar papers  
> \- harry quotes that version  
> i finally made a sideblog, find me at [worstsir](http://worstsir.tumblr.com).


End file.
